In today's environment, virtually every municipality, agency, educational institution, mass transportation center, financial institution, utility plant and medical center must plan for threats to the security of its property, employees, customers, citizens and information technology (IT) infrastructure. Additionally, businesses in every sector face challenges in protecting their customers, employees, and assets while working to reduce operating costs, improve productivity, and increase profits and customer satisfaction.
Analog video surveillance has typically involved the placement of analog video cameras in sensitive or strategic areas of a particular business, coupled with closed-circuit television (CCTV) for live monitoring. This serves not only to deter crime, but also to record the movement of people and property. Mobile methods of video surveillance, such as mounting cameras in patrol cars, buses and trains are also often utilized to record events.
The use of analog video cameras results in the creation of hundreds of videotapes that then must be viewed by security personnel. The cost of employing security guards to monitor hundreds of cameras, in addition to storing a high volume of videotapes, can be prohibitive. Additionally, videotapes can have poor image quality and may deteriorate over time.
Also, analog video can often only be viewed from a single end point that is not shared. This limits the ability to distribute information across an enterprise, which could help minimize company-wide threats and alerts. Finally, analog video systems cannot extract business intelligence from security data.
Digital video surveillance (DVS) has been used to overcome some of the shortcomings of traditional analog video surveillance systems. The emergence of digital video, IP video cameras, networked video recorders, web video, consumer cameras and video-based intelligence is opening up a wide range of applications providing enhanced functionality and business value to organizations. DVS enables clients to establish effective risk management strategies that will help them manage and safeguard business information and technology assets, anticipate vulnerabilities and risk, and maintain timely access to information.
Migrating to a DVS solution may help address some of the limitations of a tape-based analog system. DVS can help organizations achieve better returns on their security investments by: enabling real-time detection and potential prevention of security incidents through enhanced intelligence gathering; using event-based viewing for investigative purposes, thereby eliminating the need to chronologically review videotapes; reducing the need to monitor video cameras and change tapes; increasing product security by deterring potential shoplifters and monitoring staff; providing evidence against fraudulent claims; and increasing indoor and outdoor security.
However, many organizations have piecemeal solutions and may be challenged by having multiple systems that do not communicate with each other. Often, the separation of IT and physical security does not allow organizations to take advantage of existing IT infrastructures and applications, such as identification (ID) management and transactional systems that may already be in place. Operating separate systems for IT and physical security is not only less effective, but also more labor intensive and costly.
More recently, so-called “smart surveillance systems” have emerged, which apply automated signal analysis and pattern recognition to video cameras and sensors with the goal of automatically extracting “usable information” from video and sensor streams. However, prior art smart surveillance systems have been limited in the types of information that may be identified and extracted from people.